Hilary Rosen paces the creaking oak floor of the Oxford Union debate hall, eyeing the empty pews the way a Roman gladiator might have surveyed the Colosseum. Rosen is the chair of the Recording Industry Association of America, and in a few hours she'll be standing here in a black formal gown, getting ripped to pieces. Along with several other industry executives, she's charged with defending the proposition: "This house believes that the free-music mentality is a threat to the future of music."

Richard BallardHilary Rosen in the Washinton, DC, office of the Recording Industry Association of America.

Of course, the students of "this house" believe nothing of the sort. "I myself have about 900 megabytes of music on my computer," Dave Watson, the union's president, tells me before the debate. "You'd be hard-pressed to find a group of students who've never downloaded music. You can't stop them, as long as it's free."

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"Are you nervous?" I ask Rosen. She's checking out the two doors students will exit through to cast their votes - one for "ayes" and another for "noes." She looks a little hurt by the suggestion. "I just want to win," she says.

Most people in Rosen's place would consider themselves lucky just to make it out alive. Reviled by college kids, music fans, and more than a few recording artists for the RIAA's role in forcing the shutdown of Napster, Rosen is seen as the embodiment of a venal corporate culture hurtling toward obsolescence. It seems she'll stop at nothing to frighten those who share music online instead of buying it in a store - hacking into networks, threatening universities and businesses, sending out subpoenas to unmask music-swappers. Some Hilary haters have protested her speeches and urged others to mail her excrement. On a scale of odiousness, devotees of the Web site Whatsbetter?com rated Rosen just below Illinois Nazis but better than Michael Bolton (and way above pedophile priests). On the more serious side, death threats once prompted Rosen to travel with security. "People take their free music seriously," Rosen says wryly.

By the time darkness falls over Oxford's Gothic towers, the debate hall is packed with hundreds of students. Rosen delivers her opening statement, a characteristically passionate indictment of file-sharing. In order for artists to record music, she says, they - and record labels - have to make money. And in order for them to make money, people have to stop helping themselves to copyrighted music whenever the mood strikes. That, plain and simple, is stealing.

Over occasional hisses and boos, Rosen asks the students to raise their hands if they've ever downloaded music. Two-thirds do. She asks them to lower their hands if they are buying less music these days. About half oblige. Then she asks the remaining students to lower their hands if they are buying more music. Few do. "That's because it's all rubbish!" someone shouts from the audience. By now there's such confusion that many students look at one another quizzically and jerk their hands up and down.

She has heard, she says, that Oxford students must sign away their rights to anything they create in the course of their studies. "Doesn't this piss you off?" Rosen demands. Crass words for genteel Oxford, but that's the thing about Hilary Rosen: She usually says what she means.

None of Rosen's opponents rebuts her on legal grounds. Commercially speaking, it's hard to argue that peer-to-peer music-sharing doesn't have the same effect as walking out of Virgin Megastore with the latest Coldplay CD under your jacket. But by moralizing the issue - here and in a series of ads featuring artists like Stevie Wonder and Britney Spears - Rosen and her colleagues have failed to grasp the fact that they've already lost. File-sharing has become part of pop culture; witness the Intel ad that shows a scruffy guy happily burning tunes onto a CD-R. To some extent, at least, the record companies have themselves to blame. Whereas blank CDs sell for pennies at the nearest CVS, the price of new releases continues to creep up in most stores, to the point where movies can be cheaper to own.

Rosen, 44, seems to have planted herself squarely in the path of inevitable technological change. In fact, she's far from naive: She knows downloadable music is the format of the future. In her view, the survival of the music industry depends on creating legitimate online alternatives to file-swapping, and she sees label-owned Web sites like pressplay and MusicNet as a way of offering music by subscription, in the same way cable operators deliver movie channels. When the industry figures out how to make those services work, the labels could earn back the income they've lost to file-trading. Until then, Rosen has to pull off an almost impossible balancing act: convincing music executives to invest in online services that won't yield profits anytime soon while also trying to keep the free-music marauders at bay.

As the Oxford debate degenerates into snide attacks on the industry and disgusted groans from Rosen, students begin filing out of the hall. Rosen writes a note on a scrap of paper, folds it carefully, and asks the person sitting behind her to pass it down. The note has my name on it. "I've counted four votes so far through the exit door," her scrawl says. "I'm feeling good!!"

In the end, the number of votes in favor of Rosen's proposition is higher than that - but not nearly high enough. Rosen loses, 233 to 72. "OK, can we just be honest about one thing?" she asks as we leave the hall. "They hate me here!" Oddly, she says this as though she really wants to be loved. "I've spoken to a lot of colleges, and I've never had a reaction like that."

Just then, about 25 students seated outside at a picnic table burst into applause. "It was a tough crowd!" one kid jokes as Rosen walks by. Another calls after her, "We were with you in spirit!"

"Your cynicism makes me feel better," Rosen replies over her shoulder. That's the other thing about Rosen: She usually gets the last word.

Matt Bai (mattbai@aol.com) is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine.